While both are great applications, they each cost around $80 US.

Recently, Sun Microsystems (makers of Solaris, big purple servers and pony tailed CEO’s) have unleashed a new virtualization product on the world: VirtualBox, and while it lacks many of the features of the other two it’s free, easy to use and works reasonably well.

Step 1: Download

Download the latest version of VirtualBox for OS X from the support Wiki.

Step 2: Install VirtualBox

Mount the Downloaded Disk Image and run the VirtualBox.mpkg file. This should place a VirtualBox.app in your /Applications Directory

Step 3: Create a Virtual Machine

Helpful wizards jump up to walk you through creating a new Virtual Machine, but in case you miss them, click the blue “New” button in the upper left of the main VirtualBox window and follow the directions.

You will need to make 2 decisions:

1. How much RAM to allocate. I found that 512 was adequate for a stock Windows XP installation. This will vary greatly with what you are attempting to use the virtual machine for, but for cross browser testing and basic usage was fine.
2. How much HardDrive space to use. The wizard will strongly encourage you to set this “dynamically”, meaning that although you may specify that the virtual machine can use up to 25 GB of space it won’t use that much right away. Instead, it will slowly increase the amount of space taken as you use the virtual machine.

Step 4: Install Windows

At the conclusion of the Virtual Machine creation wizard, you will be prompted to begin the Windows installation process. Push F8, partition the hard drive with NTFS, enter your code, choose your TimeZone and an hour of tediousness later you’ll be dumped at the Windows Desktop.

Step 5: Setup Networking

By default, the VirtualBox networking was set to Network Address Translation (NAT), where the VirtualBox pretends that it’s in its own separate network from the network that your Mac is actually running on. While this can be useful in some specialized cases, to just get up and running it’s not necessary.

1. Shutdown the Windows virtual machine
2. With the Virtual machine selected. Click “Settings” and choose “Network”.
3. Set the Attached value to “Host Interface”
4. Make sure that the correct host interface is set in the bottom of the screen. i.e. if you’re using wireless select AirPort. If you’re plugged in, select Ethernet.
5. Restart the Windows virtual machine and you should be good to go. The machine should pickup an address automatically off of your home network. *

* There is a fairly big assumption here that you’re in a place with a working DHCP server. If this is not the case: you’re in a Starbucks, Don’t have Internet access, etc. you’re going to need to fiddle with the network settings.

[updated 9/30/2008] – I was up too late when I made the original post for this and needed to go back and fix some grammatical and formatting errors.

MacApper is running a contest for the best “switcher” story: someone ditching Windows for the Mac. Today’s entry was interesting, Joe Goh founder of FunkeeMonk a windows programmer turned Mac software developer.

Personally, I was less interested in his “switching story”, than in the story of how he got started with his business. As near as I can tell, Joe chose the absolutely hardest route possible to create a salable software application. Don’t take my word for it, read his “Bittersweet story in 15 slides” (warning: pdf link). It chronicles his creation of “FunkeeStory”, the wildly un-googleable name for his Treo->Mac SMS message application.

While, I’ve nothing but respect for Joe and his work there are a couple things I might have done differently if I were in Joe’s spot:

1. Created a “starter” application that was a release milestone with fewer features than the 1.0 of FunkeeStory. Anything to: get users, get cashflow, get an “real” release under your belt. Some sort of Treo/OSX file transfer application seems like a possible step.

2 Charge more. It’s obviously not the whole story in the slides but pricing decisions were made based on feedback from users saying “Your app is too expensive!”, even after discounting from $25 to $20. This is extremely dangerous as users would say the same thing even if it was $10. My suggestion would be to go the other route, pick a date a couple weeks from now and say that on that day you’re doing to double the price. Explain on the site that you need mexican food and microbrews to function and output more great software and take the resulting sales data as another price point on your supply demand curve.

It might also be helpful to read Camels and Rubber Duckies by Joel.

Technorati Tags: startups, osx, mac, software, pricing, strategy

Found out about this very interesting application (system enhancement?) called ThisService by WaffleSoftware.

Across all operating systems in modern computing there are both command line and GUI programs. While there are some limited ways of getting them to interact it’s usually a big tradeoff:

- Command Line apps (of the Unix lineage) are small and allow you to pipe inputs from one application to another and are typically very easy to write and extend.

- GUI programs are intuitive in the sense that you can see some buttons and click madly at them like a lemur on barbiturates until something happens. They’re discoverable.

What ThisService does is bridge the gap between the two via the Services menu found in OS X applications. You pick your scripting language of choice (AppleScript, Ruby, Perl, Python or PHP) and off you go.  The resources page has around 15 scripts that have been created so far, but this seems like such a fantastic idea that I can really see that number ballooning up. 

]]> http://www.buzzwordcompliant.net/2007/05/01/thisservice-the-greasemonkey-of-os-x/feed/ 1 http://www.buzzwordcompliant.net/2007/01/05/maczot-manical-rage/ http://www.buzzwordcompliant.net/2007/01/05/maczot-manical-rage/#comments Fri, 05 Jan 2007 05:36:31 +0000 Michael Buckbee http://www.buzzwordcompliant.net/index.php/2007/01/05/maczot-manical-rage/ Another disturbing development from the Mac Shareware front: Garrett Murray developed an application called xPad (stickies, text edit replacement) for OS X and was selling it as shareware. He agreed to sell the website, application and some other bits of intellectual property to Brian Ball of macZOT, a shareware promotion website. Sales apparently weren’t as brisk as Mr. Ball would have liked and he stopped making payments for xPad to Garrett but continued to sell the application itself.

This was legal per the terms of the contract (an admittedly poorly written default clause), but I think that Garrett described the situation correctly, that Brian Ball and macZOT displayed “completely unprofessional behavior”.

Garrett has since decided to release xPad as freeware, if this is maniacal rage, it’s classy maniacal rage.

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I put together some Automator actions that work with Transmit FTP to automatically download the websites I run, their databases, etc. and then replicate that to a huge removable hard drive I have.

My paranoia being what it is, when I heard about Amazon’s S3 Service, I jumped at the possibility of triply backing up all my data onto Amazon’s S3 services as well. My efforts to automate this process have been less than successful as I was hoping to use a single application to achieve this. Panic has yet to release an update with S3 functionality.

Their competitor StairWays Software has updated Interarchy FTP with S3 “functionality”, for some incredibly feeble value of “functionality”. I download the demo, dropped my information in and was able to successfully list my Amazon S3 storage “buckets”, but where the app should have interpreted a series of sub-folders, it listed them only as files of type “dir”.

So for now, I have an automated solution for backing up my files, but the extra layer of safety is still a manual process of my dragging and dropping files onto a Jungle Disk managed connection to S3.

[tags]interarchy, osx, backups, s3, amazon[/tags]

He’s talking about why Apple’s Mac v. PC ads look so good online.

1. the white backdrop dramatically lowers the visual complexity of the frames, allowing room for carrying more visual detail of the actors in the allotted bandwidth, and;
2. those commercials are shot on 35 millimeter FILM then scanned into Final Cut Pro at better than HD resolution. It’s a lot of work but the effort shows.

They’re designed to be viral and passed around online, but instead of punching us in the face with flashing buttons exhorting us to: “FORWARD THIS TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTENCES!!!”, they just made them look so damn good you can barely help yourself.

[tags]Apple, OSX, Cringely, Advertising, Viral, Online, Marketing, HD, Video[/tags]